After seven years of rumors and self-serving memoirs, the Israeli media has finally published extracts from an official source about the Camp David negotiations in summer 2000. For the first time it is possible to gauge with some certainty the extent of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” to the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat’s reasons for rejecting it.

In addition, the document provides valuable insights into what larger goals Israel hoped to achieve at Camp David and how similar ambitions are driving its policies to this day.
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The [Camp David] negotiations, in July 2000, were Barak’s attempt to wrap up all the outstanding points of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians that had not been addressed during a series of Israeli withdrawals from the occupied territories specified in the Oslo agreements.
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Perhaps not surprisingly, the Israeli document does not acknowledge the most generous offer of all during the six decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the PLO’s decision in the late 1980s to renounce its claim to most of the Palestinian homeland, and settle instead for a state in the two separate territories of the West Bank and Gaza — on only 22 percent of historic Palestine.

So given the massive territorial concession made by the Palestinian leadership 20 years ago, how do Barak’s terms compare? The document tells us that Barak insisted on three main principles in agreeing to end the occupation and establish a Palestinian state…